Because ultimately, the Daleks and Cybermen are monsters rooted in the sci-fi tradition. While at surface level they both might seem to have one-track minds bent on supremacy and world domination, we know that the Daleks suffer from pride and vanity, and that the Cybermen in most cases prefer conversion to murder. In fact, the Daleks and the Cybermen make for an interesting comparison. You could hardly imagine a Weeping Angel story with the same plot-line as “ Dalek,” in which a dalek absorbed some of Rose’s DNA and began to feel emotions, a feeling so distressing to it that it begged for its own execution.ĭoctor Who Season 14 Wish-List: What We’d Like to See By Den of Geek Staff Their reasons for killing are no more complex than the reasons a cat kills a mouse. In fact, complicated lore would diminish their effectiveness, because at heart both are predators, intelligent, but not complex. The Weeping Angels and Vashta Nerada aren’t the kind of monsters that require complicated lore to be effective. And by the time you notice that you’ve acquired a second shadow, it’s too late. Like the Weeping Angels, their capacity to frighten comes from their simplicity and ubiquity. To jog the memory, ‘Vashta Nerada’ were those piranha-like shadows that strip your flesh from your bones, introduced in “ Silence in the Library”. In their horror roots, the Weeping Angels have more in common with another Moffat monster, the Vashta Nerada, than they do with other Who regulars like the Daleks and Cybermen. We know that everybody blinks in the end. “Don’t blink” is such a powerful phrase because it sounds so simple and yet is impossible. But when you dig down into what actually makes the Weeping Angels successful, the reasons all belong to classic horror. Certainly, they have aspects of sci-fi in that they are “quantum locked” and transport people back in time. The angels became not a thing waiting for you in the darkness behind your eyes, but in-your-face and obvious. And for a horror monster, that’s a problem.Īt their core, the Weeping Angels belong to the horror genre. Beyond breaking the established rules of the Weeping Angels-(to fans who wondered how the Statue of Liberty could move in the City That Never Sleeps, Moffat answered that “The Angels can do so many things”)-the Statue of Liberty angel broke the horror premise. But by the time the Statue of Liberty was revealed to be a Weeping Angel (“ The Angels Take Manhattan“), something that had once been terrifying started to feel a bit. Since “Blink”, the Weeping Angels have appeared numerous times, sometimes as the main villains and sometimes as, well, background furniture. There’s a delicious fright to the idea that an innocent stone statue might begin to move the moment you look away.īut the promised return of the Weeping Angels begs the question: are the Weeping Angels the kind of monster we want to see again and again? After all, some foods get better with age. Modern viewers might not retreat behind the sofa anymore when the Daleks roll in, but “ Blink” had people giving cemetery statues a nervous second look. In a 2020 poll of scariest Who monsters of all time, the angels ran away with the vote. Few would dispute that the Weeping Angels are NuWho’s break-out monster. Moffat, who invented the Weeping Angels, has every right to be proud of his creation. Have you heard? If not, let Steven Moffat be the first to tell you: Whittaker’s Doctor is “going to fight THE WEEPING ANGELS!!”
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